The Most Beautiful Fruits and Vegetables You’ve Never Seen

This is a story about a farm. Not just any farm, but a place where imagination sprouts out the soil. We grow really kooky, weird, wild, wonderful, tasty stuff. Honestly, the weirder the better. Like what? Moshua, oca, badger flame beet, squashini, butterfly sorrel, sunset sorrel, peachy berries, pine berries, white alpine strawberries, ice plant. Wait, what was the last one? What, you never heard of ice plant? Uh, no. Meet Aaron Choi. Aaron never had any intentions of getting into farming. I had actually planned to grab a master's and then my PhD in order to teach the study of religion in college. I took a complete 180. That 180 is thanks to his parents. After running a successful flower shop, Aaron and his sisters tried to get them to retire. But his parents had other plans. Their retirement was to go buy a farm instead. They started off growing Korean vegetables for retail markets. But then Aaron got involved, and things took a turn for the bizarre. After I got started getting my hands dirty, pulling weeds, obsessing over growing conditions, light, water, temperature, humidity, everything around it, it just became one elevated experiment after another, and I think that's where I was hooked. And all of that rang and resonated far better with me than sticking my nose in books all the time, quite frankly. Once he familiarized himself with farm life, he took the R&D to another level. We started experimenting with a lot of different greens. Then that very quickly blew off into a whole host of other relatively unfamiliar products like peachy berries, sweet jade green tomatoes, which nobody's heard of, and my favorites, oka and moshua, which even fewer people have heard of, let alone actually tasted. The goal has always been to target, first and foremost, high-end restaurants, because I think that there's a lot of trickle-down effect on new and strange ingredients. So how does one pivot from selling bulk retail items to supplying fancy high-end restaurants? I literally started making cold visits. Once the chefs started seeing what we were growing, to my surprise, they were blown away by the quality of it. I regularly get comments like, I can't believe you're growing this. Good? Yeah. Tart. It's the specialty side where my obsession fits in line with trying to familiarize the unfamiliar. There's a lot to be said about these unfamiliar foods of the world that we really need to introduce more people to, because the more we popularize, the more conversations happen around those foods. Without food, we don't have conversation.